Ernest Courant

David Ernest Courant ( born as David Ernst Courant, March 26, 1920 in Göttingen) is an American physicist.

Life and work

Courant is the son of the mathematician Richard Courant and Nerina (Nina ) Runge, daughter of the mathematician Carl Runge and therefore had since his early youth numerous contacts in the exact sciences.

With the assumption of power by the National Socialists, the family moved ( Courant had Jewish roots) over England ( Cambridge) to New York. He attended the Fieldston School and studied from 1936 physics at Swarthmore College and received his doctorate in 1943 at the University of Rochester. From 1948 he worked at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he remained until well after his retirement. From 1955, he was there a permanent member, as of 1960 Senior Scientist and Distinguished Emeritus Scientist since 1990. 1966-1986, he was also an Adjunct Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has been a visiting scientist at Fermilab (1968 /69), CERN (1974 ), Cambridge University (1956 ), visiting professor at Princeton University (1950 /51) and Yale University (1961 /62).

Courant was a pioneer in the development of particle accelerators. In 1952 he developed with M. Stanley Livingston and Hartland Snyder strong focusing principle for synchrotrons, which made it possible to hold the particle and an important prerequisite for particle accelerators of ever higher energy was .. Shortly afterwards turned out that the concept as early as 1949 by Nicholas Christofilos had been discovered and patented by one but soon agreed to.

Courant is a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1976.

In 1987 he received the first Robert R. Wilson Prize of the American Physical Society and the 1986 Enrico Fermi Award from the Department of Energy. He also received the Boris Pregel Award of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Writings

• Early History of the cosmotron and AGS at Brookhaven, in Brown, Dresden, Hoddenson (ed. ) From pion to quarks. Particle Physics in the 1950s, Cambridge University Press 1989